Familiarity
by Ravenrising
Summary: She's locked away and she can't help but recall things she knows or things that are familiar to her. Slight delving into the mind of Belle and what she knows. NOW CONTINUED. Rumple's POV in Chapter 2. Potential four chapters.
1. Chapter 1

AN: Gosh darn it, I ship it. Not entirely sure what this was born out of, other than a desire to peek into Belle's head. A special shout out to my editor and wonderful friend, Perfume. Without her, ideas and discussions for many fandoms would stay locked up inside my head with no one to put them off onto.

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><p>The room is cold, like usual. The air has a familiar scent of mustiness and rust. With a heavy sigh, she cards fingers through her hair but gets caught up in tangles and knots so her hands fall listlessly. Her arms curl themselves across her knees, which she has pressed to her chest, all in familiar gestures. Everything she does, thinks, feels or sees is familiar or routine. The padded walls that surround her; the covered windows; the only other people she catches sight of. The spot she's folded herself into is also well-known to her. It's one of those days, then; reminiscence, facts, and theories are her companions. She can recall the smell of the forests that surrounded her home-a heady scent of pine and the occasional wisp of evergreen. She misses the long walks through the sprawling courtyard gardens. She misses being able to curl up with a treasured book and lose herself in it.<p>

She appreciates what little sunlight she receives, although the warmth is practically non-existent. She remembers what it feels like, though...or at least she thinks she does. She remembers days filled with light and warmth-tilting her head back and feeling the kiss of that sunlight and the peace it brought.

She has a very distinct memory of it. He's spinning yet more gold and she is confident that he should have just a little more warmth around him. A joke and a heavy tug send her tumbling, and then the next thing she knows she's being rescued from a dangerous fall. She can recall the pounding of her heart at the feel of his hands wrapped around her-across her shoulders and under her knees. She can picture the light, too-reflecting and glinting off the silvery tone of his skin. She should have been more surprised, she thinks, but somehow she just remembers the expression on his face-one of slight confusion and just maybe a desire to stay there like they are.

She wanted to. To stay, that is. Locked up in that castle if it meant that she wouldn't have been parted from him. She still isn't sure if she pushed him too fast, or if she shouldn't have at all. She just wanted to _love him_. To perhaps show him that he was worth being cared for.

She frowns as her gaze turns to her grated slice of outside. It is essentially just a bit of sky and a portion of a few trees, but it helped her hold onto her own thoughts some of the time. She's only ever had one visitor in all the time she's been locked away in her padded cell. She knows it is the mayor of the town she exists in, Regina Mills. She also knows that the mayor has some kind of long-term plan for her, for Regina has said as much. Uselessly, every time that flap opens in the door she hopes for a different face-one with stubble gracing his chin and pained dark eyes that stared at her with an intensity she hadn't come across before.

She knows this Regina Mills, though. There is a very large part of her that wishes she had not been so eager to fall for the hopeful tale of true love's kiss that day in the forest. If she hadn't, she might have still been with him. She had been hopeful that she could break the curse on him-that the power he possessed was, in fact, unwanted.

She supposes that her sanity could be questioned by this point. She's been tucked away in the dark for so long with only her own mind for company that sometimes she answers back. Sometimes the words echo like she is living it in the present instead of a memory.

"_It's quite simple, really. My power means more to me than you." _

"You're a liar, Rumplestiltskin," she replies confidently. "I would have given you anything that was in my power to do so."

The words tumble through her head, sometimes in whispers and sometimes in shouts. She is not crazy, she swears it.

"_No one-no one- could ever, _ever_ love me!" _

"Does that make me a no one?" she whispers back. She gives the words her breath and a voice. She is determined to make him believe, even though he is nowhere that she knows of. "I loved you. I still do."

Her kiss was never given in treachery or in trickery, but only ever in love and genuine devotion. She can recall his lips on hers-cool and surprisingly soft. She loved him for his kind moments, and maybe a part of her loved him in the absence of them. At one point during her stay, he gifted upon her an entire library. He claimed he had little use for it, choosing instead to spend his days at his spinning wheel in search of forgetfulness. Upon seeing her own joy at the extravagance of it, she could have sworn that his eyes softened just a little.

A familiar grief strikes at her heart. Even after their falling out, she would have willingly gone back to him. Anything was better than the alternative she had found herself faced with.

Tearful and aware of being utterly alone, Belle had wandered the forest for what could have been hours or no time at all. She knows she should have been more careful, but the emotional pain she was feeling dulled her mind from whatever awareness she should have had. She can recall in hindsight that she could hear steady footsteps behind her and a soft creak of leather. In that moment when she began to turn, a sharp pain raced across her temple and it all went black. When she awoke, she was once again in a dungeon.

_She was getting rather weary of facing nothing but stone and metal bars. Her head throbbed with every beat of her heart. She raised shaky hands to tenderly prod at her temple. Just beneath her dark hair lay an egg-sized lump. The hem of her skirt was stained with dirt and one of her sleeves was torn. There wasn't much to inform her of where she was, or with whom. Four simple walls of blocked stone and a door comprised of metal bars. _

"_H-Hello?" she stuttered, afraid and unsure of what mess she had landed herself in this time. With no other options left to her, she came to a quick decision of trying to discover who exactly had taken her prisoner._

_A swish of elegant fabric across the uneven floor preceded the tall woman. _

"_Good evening, my dear. So glad you could finally join me," she said. Her ruby red lips slowly spread into a perfectly sinister grin. "I must admit, that would be the fault of my Huntsman. He is not the most delicate of beings and I was rather vague on how he got you here, so long as you were alive and whole. I would assume that he meant he could simply bestow a blow and be done with it."_

"_Why?" Belle questioned. She was quite certain she wanted to elaborate on that point, but she was having a slight amount of trouble putting the words together at the moment._

"_Leverage, of course. I cannot bring myself to reveal everything I have in mind, but I will tell you this. For whatever strange reason, you mean something to that…_thing_ you call Master. I find myself playing a very precarious game, you see, so I also find that having alternate means of being the victor in said game a necessity," she explained. The Queen moved a few steps closer to the door of Belle's prison and gripped the bars with a hard grip. "You, lovely girl, might prove to be useful against him." She grinned again and stepped back, the shadows quickly swallowing her up. An evil laugh fell from her lips, bouncing down the corridor along with fading clicks of her high heels and back to Belle, who was frozen a bit with shock._

"_Please! Please, no!" She cried. "I'm not what you think I am." Her voice rose in panic. "I serve no purpose to you! Let me go…just let me go back to him, please…." _

_Overcome with sobs, Belle crawled to a far corner and curled into herself-knees to her chest and arms wrapped around. _

She remembers dark days in that cell. She wanted nothing more than to be free of the stone walls that surrounded her. She would go home if she could, but first she would go back to him. It would be weak and not very like a heroine, but she would do it if she could. She would imagine, on occasion, just what she would say to him. Tell him she was sorry, maybe? That she regretted not being with him in whatever way she could-as a friend, as a servant if need be?

The last memory she has of that time is an opaque, inescapable smoke roiling over her. After that, she woke up here, in this cell. Surely if she was insane as they labeled her, she would remember something else, anything else, in between?

She was distracted by the creak of her cell door opening, which struck her as odd. She couldn't even recall the last time those hinges swung outward. She was about to turn her head when-

"You were right, dearie. An empty heart and a chipped cup were all I had, with a mountain of regrets," he said.

She gave an odd sort of gasp, an unexpected reaction due to her surprise and quickly turned to face him, pushing snarled hair out of her eyes as she did. Her mind raced with all the things she desired to say to him.

He leaned against the doorway, a cane in his left hand and carefully clasped in his right, a certain teacup with a chip along the rim. He glanced at it once and then his eyes met hers and he gave a melancholy smile to her. Just like everything else she knew, that was familiar to her, too and so was the smile she gave in return.

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><p>Please review!<p>

I took some liberties with my theories here, which might be apparent by the end. Particularly with Belle ending up in the institution and her being kidnapped in the first place. It's a theory, like I said. I'm basing it, I suppose, on what I've seen so far. Prince Charming/James is injured and then in a coma in Storybrooke, Ashley/Cinderella=pregnant, etc. So I made it the same with Belle.


	2. Chapter 2

AN: Yes, I found myself unable to resist delving into his brain..not very far, admittedly, but I took a bit of a spin. I have another potential two chapters to write, if they turn out like I want them. Thanks again to Perfume, who listens to my rants when things don't go the way I quite want and helps me work it out anyway. This is unread by anyone else. I just wrote it in an hour or two and am posting it here right away.

**Thank you so far for the reviews! And for the 600+ hits! I've never had that happen before, ever, and I am very grateful.**

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><p>It is a soft sort of day. The sun's light shines dappled through the green leafy trees. It is pleasantly warm, not too overbearing and the birds are happy enough to chirp…perhaps a bit annoyingly, if he was any judge. He was a conflicted man, if anything. He hates and loves so many things. That damned cup, for instance. Even now, it seems to mock him. The sunlight dancing in through his living room window catches the edge of it just so, making it shine and him unable to turn away from it. Even here in his home in Storybrooke, it sits in a place of honor. Tucked away on a shelf, it was easily visible but safe from harm. It is not really the cup that holds any capability to mock him, he thinks. He just seeks to torture himself. He stares at it balefully. If he had more strength, he is fairly sure he would throw it at a wall in a fit of rage. It strikes him again that he is conflicted, for he is sure that he would mourn the loss of it and who it reminds him of. Should it break, he can picture himself kneeling amongst the shards woefully attempting to piece it together again.<p>

He heaved a sigh and crossed his legs on the coffee table in front of him, slightly scattering a stack of papers he had haphazardly placed there. Absentmindedly, he tapped the end of his cane on the hardwood floor. It was still a little too early to drag himself into town and open up his pawn shop, not to mention he had a few people to visit first. His current life of luxury afforded him quite a bit of time to be introspective on his own life and person.

His conflictions arose in his mind some more. He was making plans and discarding them rapidly. Most of what he wanted depended on the accountability of certain people acting the way he expected them to, but he had to come to realize that people sometimes took him for surprise. She tended to do just that.

In an effort to distract himself from his particular line of thought, he forced his mind back to things he both loved and hated. The color red came to mind in a flash. It seems a slightly strange thing to hate, the abstract thought of a color, but there it was. Red was the color of the quill that slip of a girl attempted to trick him with. He can see the dagger covered in blood, rivulets and drips forming around his name as a new type of fright and horror welled up within him. For some reason, his mind connects his hatred of it to the terror in his son's eyes. He had after all just coldly murdered knights that were coming to take away the very thing he had cherished most at that moment in time. With nary a thought, he drove away Baelfire, whom he only ever wanted to protect.

His love for the color, however, comes from her. The way her ruby lips would stretch into a perfect grin as she perched herself on his table and told him that love was a mystery to be uncovered. The way she kindly handles the rose he gifted upon her as she told him of her desire to be a heroine.

His contemplation of the color red leads him to his love and loathing of the color blue. He sees that beautiful grin and can almost hear her laughter again as she spins in a completely innocent moment to show off her sky-blue dress. Blue comes into view as she pulls on the heavy drapery and takes a tumble. The first thing he sees after that breathless moment of adrenaline is the blue framing the mountains surrounding his castle. He feels the light on his face and it strikes him for a moment that this would be the moment where she flees in terror at the way his silver-toned skin glistens. Instead there is only a pause and she shakily offers up a "thank you". He recalls the way the dress is soft against his arms and the way she feels so light and so lovely before he drops her in a combination of surprise and fear.

She is wearing that same dress when he leads her to the ill-used library.

_He pulls on the silver handle of the tall and stately doors. With a creak of protest, they swing out towards the pair. Belle is clasping her hands in front of her, curious but anxious to find out what is being kept hidden just out of her view. She fingers the brown curls cascading over her shoulder in a gesture of anticipation. Light pours out of the room, but the only thing she can see from her particular angle is a wood floor stained a deep rich brown and towering windows showing snow-capped mountains. Distantly, she thinks whatever this room is must be facing the same way as the hall with his spinning wheel. Rumplestiltskin starts to fling around his hand in his usual florid manner, but before he can even gesture for her to cross the threshold, she has already whipped by. Her dress flies behind her, the skirt light and fluttering. _

_She gives a gasp of utter excitement. From floor to ceiling she is surrounded by books. There are three levels composing the library, each level with a ladder leaning against the cases in a shade the color of the floor. Each level is connected by a delicate filigreed staircase. She could spend years here and never find a favorite or even read every one. It is gorgeous to her eyes. There is a comforting fireplace made of stacked stones with overstuffed chairs placed in front. The entire place feels light and open, in shades of brown and tan, green and gold. _

"_I don't really know what to say," she says, a smile of absolute joy present on her face. "This is beautiful." _

_She seems overcome for a moment, so he turns away not out of privacy, but because he is not quite sure what to say. He is unused to any kind of gratitude when it comes to anyone he interacts with. When he turns back, she is quite close to him. His brow furrows a bit but his eyes are kind as he stares at her, still unsure and silent._

"_Thank you, Rumpelstiltskin. It is a gift I will treasure," she says. This time her smile is a soft one._

"_I have no use for it. Spinning is how I occupy my mind, not books," he says. She knows hidden in there is a "you're welcome" and that's enough._

It is the color of her eyes; he couldn't ever forget that.

_She puts her hand on his knee, ever so gently. She stares at him with a gaze that doesn't offer pity but rather compassion. "Tell me about your son._"

When he thinks of why he hates the color blue, he thinks of the dungeons and her eyes again. The sky is blue there as well. It is visible from high windows that are barred. Her parting words echo in his head and now that he looks back on it, he realizes how truthful she was. Every line that came from his mouth was a lie in that dungeon, but she spoke nothing but the truth. Her eyes well up with tears of pain.

"_You just don't think I can love you." _

"I'm a difficult man to love," he speaks to the emptiness that surrounds him. They are words he has spoken before, but they still hold true. In a moment of petulance, his foot nudges the important papers strewn about his coffee table that conspire with the chipped cup in mocking him.

He feels caged. He loves nothing about that feeling, but he does feel hatred for it and feeling caged is something he is quite used to. There is no mistake in his mind that although he has been imprisoned and locked away many times, he has always held the power. He was deceived and stored away in a mine, but they couldn't stay away. Snow White came to him, wanting to rely on his power for telling the future. He was truthful then. Ms. Swan was going to be the one to save them all. Regina Mills, Mayor of Storybrooke, thought that because he had been behind bars, she was the one in charge. Although he conceded and gave up that he knew precisely who he was, he was still going to come out the winner. She could go on her little power play all she wanted, but in the end he would be victorious in the way he planned.

Still, that feeling of being caged pressed upon him even now, when he was as physically free as he could possibly be.

He hated and loved his curse. His curse gave him power when he had been powerless. He had wealth and luxury and once upon a time, he had _her. _

He uncrossed his legs and dropped them from his antique coffee table. He leaned forward and picked up the manila folder he had bartered for. Surprisingly delicate for a man like himself, his thumb swept down the edge of the photograph paper clipped to the side. Regina Mills was going to pay. The Queen was going to pay. Her deceit cost him the one thing he loved in both realms. Blue eyes stared up at him, unfocused and yet somehow mournful. Brown hair was tousled around a familiar face. Regardless of what Belle knew or didn't know, she needed him. He would do whatever it took to free her of her own cage, starting now. He had plans to make and things to take care of. His eyes flickered to that cup. It no longer seemed to be mocking him, instead brightly gleaming and seeming to be in agreement that she was in need of a rescue. He hummed a little and flipped to the first page, bracing himself for a war.

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><p>Please review!<p> 


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